Personal Aside: Angels & Demons? A Lying Anti-Catholic Novel Brings Religious Hatred to the Big Screen…with Opie Directing.

Angels & Demons.

It’s payback time for the Catholic Church which stands for such anti-social things as marriage between man and woman, marital fidelity, preserving human life from conception through birth to natural death…enough to enrage one Dan Brown, a former songwriter and pop singer who undertook to mislead the public by conjuring up a conspiratorial tale with the Catholic Church as demon in the book “The Da Vinci Code” —a tale alleging that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in [the] novel are accurate.”

What a laugh! He describes the Opus Dei prelature as a “religious order” with its leading protagonist “an Opus Dei monk.” Simple checking would have told Brown that it is not a religious order and that it has no monks whatever. Brown carried on the fiction as he rolled in the millions by declaring that his work is “research-intensive” and “entirely factual.”

As Satan is the progenitor of lies, it is clear that the work is demonic as well as a published sacrilege. It is only natural that Hollywood would seek to exploit its longtime grudge with moral absolutes to produce a film directed by none other than Ron Howard, formerly the innocent little Opie Taylor in the Andy Griffith TV series. As demonism is its own reward conferred by the Prince of this World, the film has garnered $758 million worldwide.

The theory…much accepted by some liberal nominally “Catholic” women I know (angered that they can’t be priests)…is that the hideous old Church, flailing around in hatred of women, has concealed for 2000 years the fact that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene whose body is in fact the Holy Grail and a group was formed…principally Opus Dei…to preserve the secret. Of course the female lead in the film played by Audrey Tautou turns out to be a descendant of Christ and Magdalene—just so happens. Probably the most damning condemnation was made by Sir Ian McKellan who played in the picture: “While I was reading the book I believed it entirely…Bu when I put it down I thought, `What a load of codswallop!”

Now the balding, 55-year-old Howard and his star Tom Hanks have produced another, a film based on a book that was written prior to “The Da Vinci Code” but which has the same demonic inspiration, “Angels & Demons.” It is riddled with error posing as fact. “The Wanderer,” the oldest national Catholic weekly for which I write a column, has researched it and here are two of many examples. As I write it’s about midnight on Monday so I’ll complete this tomorrow with more clarifications of the scurrilous lies written by Brown, perpetrated by actor Tom Hanks and propagated by the balding, red-haired, buck-toothed, grinning, gaping director Howard:

1. Hank discovers evidence that an ancient secret society, “The Illuminati” has surfaced in Rome and intends to detonate an “antimatter” bomb in the Vatican during the conclave to elect a new Pope. The book maintains that CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) has produced particles of antimatter “the most powerful energy source known to man” whose “single gram…contains the energy of a 20-kiloton nuclear bomb—the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” CERN says it is not possible to use antimatter as an energy source: “It would be very dangerous if we could make a few grams of it but it would take billions of years.”

2. The film says, “Outspoken scientists like Copernicus…were murdered. Murdered by the [Catholic] Church for revealing scientific truths. Religion has always persecuted science.” Copernicus [1473-1543] was a devout Catholic who devised the theory that the earth revolves around the sun. He dedicated his theories to Pope Paul III. Copernicus died of natural causes.

3. Hanks says to his girl friend (the descendant of Christ, I mean): “Aha! This is the traditional seal of the Vatican—the sacred symbol of the Holy See or `holy seat’ of government, the seat being literally the ancient throne of St. Peter!”

Peter never had a throne in Rome or anywhere else. He was constantly on the run in Rome while he was building the Church and evading those who eventually murdered him by crucifixion around AD 65.


4.“In 1857 Pope Pius IX decided that the accurate representation of the male form might incite lust inside the Vatican. So he got a chisel and mallet and hacked off the genitalia of every single male statue inside Vatican City. He defaced the words of Michelangelo, Bramante and Bernini”


Sorry, Piux IX was a grand benefactor of Italian art and art historians have not identified any Michelangelo statuary that had been so defaced.